The lab results are in. Even though it's only 1 data point, this seems to lend pretty strong support to the 100IBU ceiling on a beer. The testing took a bit longer than I hoped, but for 5 bucks you can't go wrong with what they're offering at http://coastalsciencelabs.com/

As I was setting up for my Winter Warmer brewday today I noticed a 3lb bag of DME that I had forgotten about. I think I'm going to squeeze in an extra brew today. I figure I can win some brownie points with the wife by cleaning a couple of pounds of whole leaf hops out of the freezer.

I don't know if these will all even fit in the kettle, but damn it I'm going to try like hell to stuff them all in there. Hopping rate in the kettle will be just over a pound per gallon. If I calculate a 90 minute hop stand as a 15 minute addition, then Tinseth gives me over 1500 IBU's. That makes my inner hophead smile.

I think I'm actually going to have to turn the heat back on after I add my hops because at this high of a hopping rate they will probably chill my wort down lower than I want.

This is what 1 pound per gallon of flameout hops looks like. Good god. I might have actually gone too far on this one...

There's a fine line between hop bliss and madness.....very,very fine . In 20 years I've met maybe 1 or 2 people that hop heavier than me in American styles, but you are there. Can't wait to read on this one !

Quick update. Managed to get about 1.25 gallons into the fermenter. My "whirlpool" consisted of pressing the hops down with a lid from a small pot to squeeze out some "wort", then quickly folding some hops over a few times before it all got reabsorbed. Repeat every 5-10 minutes for an hour.

After an hour or so of what I guess you could call a hop stand, I scooped out just under half of the slightly damp hops into my BIAB bag in a colander over another large pot. I twisted and squeezed the crap out of the bag to get as much juice out as possible. I added the juice back to my kettle and the wort was now the consistency of drained, cooked spinach. I repeated the process one more time. Now the kettle was the consistency of my normal "hop the crap out of it IPA".

I brought the kettle back up to 190ish for a few minutes just to make sure any bugs I may have picked up in the multiple squeezings got pasteurized. Then I chilled, and dumped the whole thing into a bucket lined with my sanitized BIAB bag. I squeezed every last drop out of the bag, aerated and pitched about 1/4 pack of US-05. The trash bag full of nothing but squeezed hops was about the size of a 3-gallon better bottle. Can't wait for this one.